by Terry Hale
Then she did open her eyes and, suddenly alarmed, probed mine as if to read in turn the extent of my knowledge …
She was staring into my eyes so fixedly that she didn’t see me slip the glass phial into my mouth.
Perhaps she didn’t even hear me as I screamed:
‘Die!’
All I remember was this: her pupils under mine, next to mine, two fierce pupils trying desperately to understand, two frightened holes against a blue night. And this: my mouth glued against hers, and the frantic crunching of the phial breaking against our teeth.
That was all.
***
And after that, immediately after that, the painless night, nothingness …
And then, with no perceptible beginning, the half suggestion of a dream, a colourless dream however, as empty of images as of ideas; a sense of existence, but a murky, ill-defined sense, as if far away; pain, yet a pain hovering as if in mid-air, not unlike, I suppose, the experience of patients who have been operated on under chloroform.
Then, time passing …
While in this comatose state, the perception of life began to return: I still couldn’t feel anything, but I was aware of myself. My growing self-awareness was uniquely, through the medium of pain, which in some way seemed to be a stage of my own pre-existence, a point of focus.
And the pain, while yet confused, became more distinct. It became more and more defined. It was still general, and impossible to localise. But as time went by, it too became more specific until, all over and at the very same moment, I could feel each of my individual tortured muscles. Imagine a dissection lesson on a living animal, and all the innumerable fasciculi of flesh being manipulated by pincers, by thousands of automated pincers, all working in concert to tear, expose, detach and compress every fibre of every muscle simultaneously, without neglecting a single one!
From their agony, I could identify each and every cell; they groaned; competing to signal their presence. Instead of diminishing in intensity, the longer this torture continued, the more it gained in acuteness.
It was during this period that I completely regained consciousness.
My flesh was being twisted and pulled, but only in my imagination; for my whole body remained unaltered and, despite writhing in agony, it seemed to me that I never actually moved. My whole being was immersed in pain, but only my inner being was reeling. Not a single reflex action ran through my inert mass. Under a mask of impassiveness, I was a raw lump of suffering, a sleeping statue of convulsive molecules, a block of aching marble, hardly alive, but so, so sensitive.
Then the moment came when I could see.
My faculties of perception, as if shedding their scales, imperceptibly returned: I began by being able to distinguish shapes close at hand; but what I saw failed to register itself on me immediately because of the pain, the pain occupied all my attention; images entered my brain and lodged there, waiting for me to acknowledge them, which I did, by and by.
The first sense to completely reawaken was that of my pale epidermis, and I no doubt noticed it before the others because my sufferings had initially directed my renascent thoughts towards myself.
The only part of my body that I could see was my left hand and arm which lay in my direct line of vision; the sight of the rest was out of the question because I couldn’t move my eyes.
The second image, occurring almost simultaneously, was that of a black, swollen face in front of, but slightly below, my own, and which my gaze had stumbled on at the same time as I had noticed my own arm.
They were both wreathed in fog however.
The fog slowly lifted, or almost, and my mind became more lucid.
With consciousness, my tortures redoubled; so intense did they become that I must have fainted more than once.
On each occasion, due to the temporary respite to my nerves, I saw and understood more, remembered more clearly. Memory assisted comprehension; consequences recalled causes. After a while, my ideas became ordered, one by one, until, at last, I knew.
The horror! This face before me …
The corpse’s face was bluish-grey in colour, irises dilated and glassy, the mouth wide open, the gums scarlet, teeth tarnished, and the nose soft and twisted, leaning over to one side, oozing puss …
I tried to scream. Nothing. The air never left my lungs. A pair of bellows without a handle. How could I be breathing then? Oh! I was only just breathing …
I could smell the stench of the corpse and everything came flooding back.
‘Berthe is dead. I must be alive.’
Despite being racked by torture, I tried to piece together what had happened: but I was suffering too greatly, and the task was almost beyond me.
Eventually, the most likely hypothesis emerged: Berthe, lying beneath me, had absorbed the greater part of the poison, which had trickled down into her mouth; I must have been pushed over on my side by a particularly violent spasm; as a result, I had only inhaled some of the toxic vapours, not enough to have killed me, but enough to render me insensible. My heart must have continued to beat imperceptibly, and my thorax to function just sufficiently to stave off asphyxiation.
‘My body must be eliminating the poison. Shall I recover? Oh! The pain!’
The poison, attacking only the muscular system, had left my nervous system intact; thus would I remain, capable of feeling pain, and of thought: the nerves would transmit feelings and commands, but the mechanics would not obey.
‘Please somebody, finish me off or save me! Finish me off!’
Silently I screamed: ‘Help!’
But nobody came. The house was deserted. Nobody knew we were there. Nobody would look for us.
Madness to hope that one of the rare passers-by would suddenly take it into their head to open the gate, walk across the garden, and enter a locked-up house. I was going to die there, slowly, of horror, of hunger, and of thirst.
I screamed speechlessly for hour upon hour on top of the corpse. A nauseous smell came from the open mouth, entering my own.
Decomposition having set in, we must have been here for some time. A day? Two days?
Night fell. At least the night hid that face from me, I was aware of it only by the smell.
‘Oh! The pain! How long will I have to endure this before I die?’
I must have fainted again, for the night seemed relatively short.
Daybreak brought some relief: the pain had subsided slightly. But Berthe’s mouth was even more horrible than the day before.
‘Am I going to recover?’
It seemed to me as if the use of my muscles was starting to return … I could breathe more easily. My heart beat was stronger … I was extremely cold.
I transmitted orders to my limbs unceasingly.
There was a moment when there could no longer be any doubt: my left arm had obeyed!
I saw it move!
I could move my hand only a few millimetres per hour, but move it I could.
With great effort, I managed to distance myself from the hideous face.
‘Agh!’
Spring sunlight flooded the room, and gave an indication of the time.
My limbs were starting to obey me more, and my efforts slowly resulted in an appreciable gain. By nightfall, I had succeeded in edging twenty centimetres over to my left, in retracting my limbs, and had stretched myself out.
That evening, I suffered greatly. Eventually, I fell asleep with my eyes open.
I woke up in the middle of the night because of the cold.
I was suffering less. I was able to inflate my lungs further. I could move. Each movement was agony, yet I had only one thought and that was to get away even if the effort should kill me!
Out of some animal-like flicker of hope, which survives as long as life itself, I was still trying to shout for help: but the sounds remained buried in my unyielding stomach, and my throat muscles remained impotent.
No matter! Still I tried, listening for the result. ‘Help me!’ I screamed. Silence w
as all I heard.
Would this night, life itself, never end?
‘Help!’
At last, a shout, weak, but nonetheless a shout, came out, and was lost in the gloom …
You have to have been buried alive to know what it is, everything it represents, its real worth, and all its hidden meaning, when your voice suddenly rings out in the blackness, rousing objects out of their inanimacy, reaffirming their unseenness, resisting them, denying nothingness! All the consolation it radiates, because fashioned of life itself, and all the horror it leaves in its wake, because there is no reply!
I shall hear that first scream for ever. There was no music in the world that could ever be half so beautiful or poignant, and so, to hear it again, to reassure myself of a living presence in the sepulchral atmosphere of the room, to feel some sort of vibration around me during my last hours, and so as not to die alone, I started to scream continually; it was almost an escape.
With dawn, my breath was deeper and my voice more resonant: already it could reach the corner of the room, but I was still unable to utter a single word.
The light grew stronger: I could see Berthe next to me.
I could hardly recognise her in the hazy first light of morning, but being now able to move my eyes, I could see all of her. The first thing I saw was an enormous stomach like something coming out of the fog … She was in exactly the same position on the bed as a drowned man in the water surrounded by an early morning mist.
The day was at its height. The sun shone in.
Berthe! That was Berthe! That greenish, bloated stomach, those mottled breasts, one flat and the other drooping down like a gourd of dirty water, that face, twisted and slimy, that thing, that was Berthe, her slender body, her wonderful breasts, her gleaming stomach, her defiant laugh! That thing!
Then, for the first time, the thought came to me:
‘My masterpiece! This is what I created out of her living beauty! This is what I wanted! This mass of putrefaction is the product of my will.’
***
The third day was atrocious.
Racked by fever and thirst, I entered a period of moral anguish; completely lucid, I already missed the tortures of the day before and the one before that which had transformed me into an unthinking beast.
It seemed to me that the corpse was radiating coldness, and all my skin on that side was frozen. After hours of exertion, I managed to reach the furthest edge of the bed.
But from there I could see my victim only too clearly! In spite of myself, and with all the persistency of the sick, I couldn’t help not staring at her. No sooner had I turned my gaze away, she would draw it back, and hardly would it have fixed on her again, than the arduous struggle to close my eyelids would begin anew. Why? For the simple reason that the moment I could no longer see her, my imagination would conjure up an even more horrible image of her; her inert mass would hover in the air, and a tide of putrid flesh would swirl around my head. And so I had to return to reality to chase away the nightmare.
Hours passed by like this: not all the same, as you might imagine, but divided between fits of madness and periods of inertia in which I could study the corpse almost without remorse.
I was by now totally exhausted, unaware of anything but the physical presence of Berthe’s corpse, and I drew no further conclusions from it, had no fresh thoughts about it, derived no meaning from it; in my mind I no longer identified that vile heap with my beloved Berthe. I kept them apart, one from the other. What is undeniable is that the idea of death, that brusque transition from being to non-being, remains fundamentally inconceivable to man: to imagine that a thinking creature, whose words and gestures were familiar to us, will think no more, speak no more, move no more, ever again, requires a tenacious effort from us, some indispensable intimation, thanks to which we vaguely manage to guess, for a fleeting moment, what the future will be like in the presence of this everlasting absence: cry, sob, despair, wring your hands as much as you like, these are but physical gestures, proving nothing, while deep down we remain spiritually calm because we refuse to accept it, unable to understand what has happened.
In this morbid state, my imagination fabricated other illusions:
‘My wife is away; far away, perhaps; she’s going to return; she’s letting herself in … Berthe!’
Mentally, I called out to her, perhaps even called her to my aid.
Then, suddenly, in periods of depression, reality would come flooding back: Berthe is here! That’s her, there: that’s all that remains of her.
And I would contemplate her without disgust but with infinite sadness, and I would have liked to speak to her, to implore her forgiveness, to approach her, to lay out her body, tenderly and piously, and, above all, I would have liked to close her eyes and mouth.
Her eyes … Her eye, rather – because I could only see one of them – overwhelmed me with pity. Squashed and black as it was, it still retained a certain look about it: staring fixedly at the ceiling, aware of its surroundings, tirelessly meditating. Several times while delirious I received the distinct impression that this motionless eye was trying to distil out of the air all my mute thoughts: Berthe was listening through it to all the words that my voice was incapable of uttering but which my soul was addressing to hers!
‘You can hear me, darling, can’t you?’
I remember perfectly clearly asking the question at one point. But the eye made no reply, from which I gathered that it had heard me and didn’t deign to answer.
First of all I tried childish resignation; then I tried begging. The unchanging eye spoke out: ‘He has killed a living creature and now he implores forgiveness.’
‘Berthe …’
‘I don’t wish to answer.’
‘Berthe! Berthe!’
‘I’m not able to answer. I can’t move. It’s all your work.’
I began to study the ceiling also, obstinately searching for the spot that Berthe was staring at so unrelentingly, convinced that I would be able to read her thoughts as if her dead eye had written there the things she had to tell me. And I did read her answers, calm and unambiguous. She said: ‘You killed me. It’s over. Leave me alone.’
I wanted to shout: ‘Forgive me!’
But she proclaimed: ‘What you have done is irrevocable. There’s no use in asking my forgiveness. Your remorse won’t restore me to life.’
‘I loved you so!’
‘Love is no excuse for murder.’
‘I was jealous!’
‘My life was mine alone. A wife isn’t a piece of furniture belonging to her husband, an ornament he can break when he feels like it. I was alive: each one of us is the sole master of his or her life.’
‘I killed you because you were unfaithful to me.’
‘Each of us is the sole master of his or her body. I had the right to choose another lover; and you had no right to kill me.’
‘Yes. Berthe – your fault was not serious, if fault it was; mine was atrocious. I realize that now.’
‘Too late.’
‘Forgive me!’
‘Leave me alone.’
From then on, Berthe’s gaze would no longer reply. I thought I could see it falling asleep. I was horribly alone.
I suppose at this point my delirious state came even closer to one of madness, because from then on all my memories are confused. I can remember one moment lucidly however: from time to time I continued to scream like a madman in the fetid air. The smell in the room had grown worse. A sort of filth obscured the windows which became variegated when the sun passed through. The garden foliage, caught by the wind, cast fleeting shadows across the glass and carpet; I watched the fluctuations of light and shadow; I had turned my head the better to see it; suddenly, this swarming effect began to take shape, changed into Berthe’s body then, equally suddenly, Berthe’s body was my own, stretched out under my very eyes, rotting.
I uttered a piercing scream of horror. The fear of death made me sit up. But I was still too weak and l
ost my balance almost at once, toppling off the bed …
There is another gap in my memory after that: I have no recollection of how the day ended. I have the vaguest notion that I came round towards evening and lay naked and shivering on the ground. I could hear myself groaning. Then I must have fallen asleep.
This long sleep saved my life. Long, for it was mid-morning when I awoke, tired, but my sight and judgement restored, and once more a man.
The first movement my arms were able to accomplish was to reach out towards my former loved one. Kneeling by the side of her bed, I raised up my new-born hands to her, together with my look of supplication and my useless remorse. How I cried beside that bed! And through my tears, the image of this corpse which I must describe no more, and the holy horror of this death for which I was responsible, came to me.
Yes, that morning, I loved my impassive victim with a pious and religious love which I had never known before in my life, with a great expiatory love.
With the insight bestowed by death, liberated from my own egoism, I cherished her for her own sake and not for my own, and I adored her with every atom of reverence and sadness in me, a thousand times more than at the height of her beauty.
It was in this state of mind that I was seized hold of by an obsession: ‘Nobody must see her like this.’
In order to prepare her for burial, I crossed the room on my knees. I reached the window; I managed to pull myself up and open it. Spring entered, and the infected atmosphere disappeared into the air.
***
You know the rest: the passer-by who saw me standing at the window, completely naked, and falling to the floor; the people who rescued me, my convalescence, the investigation, the trial …
They were wrong to acquit me. A tirade of stupidities. I, who have killed, can understand that one hesitates before guillotining a man! One thing I know better than anyone is that nobody has the right to punish; neither the husband, nor the judge, no-one has the right to take a man’s life. But if nobody has such a right, what aberration inspires those beings who, in the name of justice, can find attenuating circumstances in favour of a murderer? There are no excuses possible for murder.